IRAQ - MID EAST - 2013

The memos and reports featured in the Guardian /BBC
documentary come from the 2010 leak attributed to Army Private Bradley Manning
and published by WikiLeaks. The Obama administration has protected the
officials linked to the abuse, many of whom remain on the government payroll;
David Petraeus was Obama’s CIA director until last November. Guardian/BBCreport lays out US policy of torture, murder in Iraq

3/15/2013

Tony Blair sent British troops into Iraq a decade
ago without paying enough attention to the region's history, according to the
senior former mandarin who investigated the reasons for the invasion.

the House of
Representatives in 2004 identified “237 misleading statements about the threat
posed by Iraq that were made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney,
Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice. These
statements were made in 125 separate appearances, consisting of 40 speeches, 26
press conferences and briefings, 53 interviews, 4 written statements, and 2
congressional testimonies.” According to the committee, at least 61 separate
statements “misrepresented Iraq’s ties to al-Qaeda.” A Senate investigation in
2006 also covered these lies

The American military’s conduct of the war produced
crimes of staggering dimensions. This included the turning of Fallujah, a city
of 350,000 people, into a free-fire zone, the bombarding of its occupants with
white phosphorus shells, banned by international law, and the summary execution
of wounded prisoners. Ten years later, the rates of child cancer and birth
defects in Fallujah are similar to those in Hiroshima following the US atomic
bombing.

All of this killing and violence was carried out on
the basis of lies, summed up in the claim that the Iraqi government was
concealing “weapons of mass destruction.” These false pretexts for war were no
less criminal than those used by Germany’s Third Reich to justify the invasion
of Poland and other countries targeted at the outset of World War II.

In particular, theNew York Times played
an indispensable role in legitimizing the actions of the Bush administration
and manufacturing “evidence” of nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Noted opinion makers like Thomas Friedman of the Times and Richard
Cohen and Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post deeply involved
themselves in promoting war.

In this regard, the war established a pattern of
Washington carrying out interventions for regime-change in the Middle East,
targeting secular governments and tacitly or directly backing Islamist and Al
Qaeda-linked forces to achieve its goals. Such was the case in Libya in 2011
and so it is today in Syria.

With the election of Obama, the pseudo-left
elements became full-fledged supporters of US military operations, promoting
“humanitarian” interventions in Libya and Syria.

Even as it continues its war in Afghanistan,
Washington is moving aggressively into Africa, intervening in Syria, preparing
war against Iran and “pivoting” to Asia, with increasingly bellicose threats
against China.

Cultures Of War, the distinguished historian John
W. Dower observes that the concrete acts of war unleashed by the Japanese in
the 20th century and the Bush imperial presidency in the 21st century “invite
comparative analysis of outright war crimes like torture and other
transgressions. Imperial Japan’s black deeds have left an indelible stain on
the nation’s honor and good name, and it remains to be seen how lasting the
damage to America’s reputation will be. In this regard, the Bush
administration’s war planners are fortunate in having been able to evade formal
and serious investigation remotely comparable to what the Allied powers pursued
vis-a-vis Japan and Germany after World War II.”

Dower quotes Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: “The president
[Bush] has adopted a policy of ‘anticipatory self-defense’ that is alarmingly
similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date
which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in
infamy.”

The human cost to Iraq of America’s infamy is
extraordinary: 4.5 million displaced Iraqis, as many as 1 million dead
civilians leaving widows and orphans, a professional class that has departed
the country, an infrastructure in ruins, and social cohesion destroyed by the
Sunni-Shia conflict that was ignited by Washington’s destruction of the Saddam
Hussein government.

At a recent conference the neoconservatives
responsible for the deaths and ruined lives of millions and for the trillions
of dollars that their wars piled on US national debt were unrepentant and full of self-justification. While
Washington looks abroad for evil to slay, evil is concentrated in Washington
itself.

The American war criminals walk about unmolested. They are paid large sums of
money to make speeches about how Americans are bringing freedom and democracy
to the world by invading, bombing and murdering people. The War Crimes Tribunal
has not issued arrest warrants. The US Department of State, which is still
hunting for Nazi war criminals, has not kidnapped the American ones and sent
them to be tried at the Hague.

By this October 7, Washington will have been
killing people, mainly women, children, and village elders, in Afghanistan for
12 years. No one knows why America has brought such destruction to the Afghan
people. First the Soviets; then the Americans. What is the difference? When
Obama came into the presidency, he admitted that no one knew what the US
military mission was in Afghanistan. We still don’t know. The best guess is
profits for the US armaments industry, power for the Homeland Security
industry, and a police state for the insouciant US population.

Washington has left Libya in ruins and internal conflict. There is no
government, but it is not libertarian nirvana.

The incessant illegal drone attacks on Pakistani civilians is radicalizing
elements of Pakistan and provoking civil war against the Pakistani government,
which is owned by Washington and permits Washington’s murder of its citizens in
exchange for Washington’s money payments to the political elites who have sold
out their country to Washington.

Washington has destabilized Syria and destroyed the peace that the Assad family
had imposed on the Islamic sects. Syria seems fated to be reduced to ruins and
permanent violence like Libya and Iraq.

Washington is at work killing people in Yemen.

As the video released to WikiLeaks by Bradley Manning shows, some US troops
don’t care who they kill–journalists and civilians walking peacefully along a
street, a father and his children who stop to help the wounded. As long as
someone is killed, it doesn’t matter who.

Killing is winning.

The US invaded Somalia, has its French puppets militarily involved in Mali, and
perhaps has Sudan in its crosshairs for drones and missiles.

Iran and Lebanon are designated as the next victims of Washington’s aggression.

Washington protects Israeli aggression against the
West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon from UN censure and from embargoes. Washington has
arrested and imprisoned people who have sent aid to the Palestinian children.
Gaza, declares Washington which regards itself as the only fount of truth, is
ruled by Hamas, a terrorist organization according to Washington. Thus any aid
to Gaza is aid to terrorism. Aide to starving and ill Palestinian children is
support of terrorism. This is the logic of an inhumane war criminal state.

What is this aggression against Muslims about?

The Soviet Union collapsed and Washington needed a new enemy to keep the US
military/security complex in power and profits. The neoconservatives, who
totally dominated the Bush regime and might yet dominate the Obama regime
declared Muslims in the Middle East to be the enemy. Against this make-believe
“enemy,” the US launched wars of aggression that are war crimes under the US
imposed Nuremberg standard that was applied to the defeated WWII Germans.

Although the British and French started World War II by declaring war on
Germany, it was Germans, defeated by the Red Army, who were tried by Washington
as war criminals for starting a war. A number of serious historians have
reached the conclusion that America’s war crimes, with the fire-bombings of the
civilian populations of Dresden and Tokyo and the gratuitous nuclear attacks on
the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are of the same cloth as
the war crimes of Hitler and the Japanese.

The difference is that the winners paint the defeated in the blackest tones and
themselves in high moral tones. Honest historians know that there is not much
difference between US WWII war crimes and those of the Japanese and Germans.
But the US was on the winning side

By its gratuitous murder of Muslims in seven or
eight countries, Washington has ignited a Muslim response: bitter hatred of the
United States. This response is termed “terrorism” by Washington and the war
against terrorism serves as a source of endless profits for the military
complex and for a police state to “protect” Americans from terrorism, but not
from the terrorism of their own government.

The bulk of the American population is too misinformed to catch on, and the few
who do
understand and are attempting to warn others will be silenced. The 21st century
will be one of the worst centuries in human history. All over the Western
world, liberty is dying.

The legacy of “the war on terror” is the death of liberty.

This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts' new website Institute For PoliticalEconomy. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was
columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators
Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have
attracted a worldwide following.

The New York Times carried a list of
brief comments by US academics and state officials, titled “Was it Worth It?”
Harvard University professor and former Deputy National Security Advisor Meghan
O’Sullivan made the filthy argument, “Believe it or not, we’re safer now” after
the war. Reprising the WMD lies, she argued that without invading Iraq, “It is
at least conceivable that [former Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] would have a
nuclear weapon today.”

The pundits who most prominently promoted the
war—including the New York Times ’ Thomas Friedman and Richard Cohen
and David Ignatius of the Washington Post —did not comment on the
anniversary. Friedman felt no obligation to give any accounting for his
infamous statement that he had “no problem with a war for oil” in Iraq.

The Post columnists were for their part
too busy calling for war with Syria to write on their record in Iraq. Welcoming
the sending of anti-aircraft missiles to Syrian opposition fighters, Ignatius
advocated a US-led occupation of Syria, writing, “Let’s be honest: when Assad
is gone and Syria is finally rebuilding its state, it will need massive foreign
economic and military assistance—probably including peacekeeping troops from
the Arab League or even a NATO country such as Turkey.”

The war bankrupted the United States and devastated
Iraq, whose oil fields are now looted by Western firms—including ExxonMobil,
BP, Chevron, Shell, and Cheney’s firm, Halliburton. Iraq even faces an energy
shortage, with many Iraqi civilians still lacking electricity and running
water, as 80 percent of Iraq’s oil is exported by foreign firms. They work
closely with the massive US embassy, hidden in Baghdad’s still-fortified Green
Zone, to oversee Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

US war plans in Iran and Syria flowed inevitably
from the initial crime in Iraq. Concerned that its installation of a Shiite
regime in Iraq tilted the regional balance of power too far towards Iran, the
US let the Persian Gulf monarchies arm right-wing Sunni forces led by Al Nusra
against Syria, a key Iranian ally. As yesterday’s bombing showed, Iraq again
finds itself in the middle of these war plans.

Ten years after the Iraq war began, US imperialist
wars in the Middle East continue, new ones are being prepared, and the
political criminals responsible for the wars and their media propagandists go
unpunished.

The Washington Post wrote that Iraq is
“teetering between progress and chaos,” acknowledging ongoing sectarian warfare
but citing Najaf Governor Adnan Zurfi’s comment that, “Most people now have a
good job and lots of opportunities.” Besides the fact that this is a lie, even if
it were true, it would not justify a US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Iraq War veteran Tomas Young, currently under
hospice care at his home in Kansas City, Missouri, has written a scathing “last
letter,” published at Truthdig.com, addressed to former President George W.
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Young, the subject of the 2007 documentary film Body of War ,
explains that he is writing his letter “on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War
on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the
4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of
the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of
those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I
am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004
in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end.”

Young goes on: “I write this letter on behalf of
those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed,
endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty
soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this
letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the
countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human
detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending
pain and grief.”

Addressing Bush and Cheney, Young writes: “I write
not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your
lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter
because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of
thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens,
along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully
who you are and what you have done.” Body of War, co-directed by Phil
Donahue and Ellen Spiro, recounted Young’s story, his horrendous medical
condition and his ongoing opposition to the Iraq War. Young enlisted in the US
Army after the September 11, 2001 attacks, because, as he explains in his
recent letter, “our country had been attacked.”

Only five days into his first deployment in Iraq in
April 2004, while riding in a Humvee in Baghdad’s Sadr City, the young soldier
was shot by an insurgent from above. The bullet severed Young’s spinal column.
At the time of the making of Body of War, as the WSWS reported, he was
“not only confined to a wheelchair but suffers severe attendant disabilities,
including an inability to cough, trouble regulating his body temperature, dizzy
spells, urinary tract infections and sexual dysfunction.”

After an anoxic brain injury in 2008, Young, now
33, explained to Truthdig’s Chris Hedges, “I lost a lot of dexterity and
strength in my upper body. So I wouldn’t be able to shoot myself or even open
the pill bottle to give myself an overdose.” He told Hedges, “I felt at the end
of my rope … I made the decision to go on hospice care, to stop feeding and
fade away.”

The Donahue-Spiro documentary included a number of
moving sequences of Young participating in anti-war activities where he
encountered other disabled veterans, as well as family members of soldiers who
had died in Iraq. In August 2005, along with his wife at the time, Young
traveled to Camp Casey, Cindy Sheehan’s protest encampment outside George W.
Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Unfortunately, the directors’ motives for making
the film were hardly pure.Body of War ends up as a disgraceful pitch for
the Democratic Party and its supposed anti-war credentials. The implicit hero
of the film is former Sen. Robert Byrd, Democrat from West Virginia, who
features in the film’s final scene.

Ironically, the official anti-war movement, which
included figures such as Donahue, the former television talk show host, was in
the process of dissolving itself at the time of Body of War ’s making
and release. The Democrats’ electoral victory in November 2006, followed
immediately by assurances from leading figures in that party that there would
be no impeachment of Bush and that funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
would continue, seriously began the process. The coming to power of Barack
Obama completed it.

Young himself subscribes to the view that the Iraq
War was “the largest strategic blunder in US history” and asserts in his letter
he would not feel the same despair if he had been wounded in Afghanistan
“fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of
9/11.”

Be that as it may, no figure in the Democratic
Party, an imperialist party dripping in blood, would utter heartfelt and
truthful words such as these: “I did not join the Army to ‘liberate’ Iraqis or
to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what
you cynically called ‘democracy’ in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join
the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by
Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3
trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war.
Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I
was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes.”

Young describes his body “filled with painkillers,
my life ebbing away,” dealing with the fact “that hundreds of thousands of
human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for
little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil
sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.”

Toward the end of his letter, Young writes, “I
have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often
inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other
disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of
no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We
were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. … My day of reckoning is upon me.
Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial.”

Young’s letter and condition speak to the appalling
tragedy of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the waste and destruction of hundreds
of thousands—perhaps millions—of lives, all sacrificed in the pursuit of US
imperialist dominance of the globe. The American ruling elite’s “day of reckoning”
is indeed coming.